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Security or compliance?

Mid-size organizations continue to be tossed on the horns of the Security/Compliance dilemma. Is it reasonable to consider regulatory compliance a natural benefit of a security focused approach?

Consider why regulatory standards came into being in the first place. Some like PCI-DSS, FISMA and DCID/6 are largely driven by security concerns and the potential for loss of high value data. Others like Sarbanes-Oxley seek to establish responsibility for changes and are an incentive to blunt the insider threat. Vendor provided Best Practices have come about because of concerns about “attack surface” and “vulnerability”. Clearly security issues.

While large organizations can establish dedicated “compliance teams”, the high cost of such an approach precludes it as an option for mid tier organizations. If you could only have one team and effort and had to choose, its a no-brainer. Security wins. Accordingly, such organizations naturally consider that compliance efforts are folded into the security teams and budgets.

While this is a reasonable approach, recognize that some compliance regulations are more auditor and governance related and a strict security view is a misfit. An adaptation, is to transition the ownership of tools and their use from the security to the operational team.

The classic approach for mid-size organizations to the dilemma — start as a security focused initiative, transition to the operations team.

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